Why is Boolean's size in vba 2 Bytes?

Question

In my apprenticeship we started doing now vba at school. When our teacher handed us out the data type summary, I was kind of confused. .....

Boolean -> 2 Bytes -> Range: True / False

Well True / False is of course plausible but, Why are 2 Bytes used, as Booleans hast just to be able, to represent any of 2 values? I mean theoretical we could use a single Bit for representing any value of this range. (But I know thats senseless, as we are using Highlevel-Languages)

As I asked my teacher this, he appeared as he had never asked him self the same, and after a few seconds of cogitation, he just finished this with an answer of the kind "You have to accept it, as it is, what it is." But I wouldn't call my self a good programmer, if I were just 'using', and would never be interested in understanding. So I'm asking now here:

Is there any reason in vba, why Boolean needs 2 Bytes instead of a single Byte?

Answer 1

For backwards compatibility with the original Microsoft BASIC.

Microsoft BASIC only had 3 types:

• Integer (16-Bit)
• Single (32-Bit)
• String
• (...and Arrays of the above types)

The Boolean data type didn't exist in Microsoft BASIC and only existed internally (as part of expressions).

10 INPUT "Do you want more stars? "; A$
20 IF LEN(A$) = 0 THEN GOTO 90

I'd speculate therefore that originally Boolean was created internally as an Integer. Later when upgraded to 32-bit, Boolean remained at 16-bit for backward compatibility. And I'd doubt Byte didn't exist until Visual Basic. However that's all speculation.